A Grandmother Storybook

An illustration of the story will go here.

Page 2 from New Zealand
...our lovely mountain called Mt Egmont Taranaki, which is very high (8260'). It is such a lovely day so we will go for a walk along the bush paths and I will tell you about your ancestors who came here from England, Scotland, Ireland Wales, and Poland about 125 years ago. All the rich farmland where you now live was once thick bush like it is still up on the lower mountain slopes. Life was very tough for them when they came to New Zealand, particularly for the women, most of whom came from closely settled villages in their homelands but when they came here they had to cut down bush to build themselves houses and it could be many weeks before they saw another woman. There were no schools in those isolated places so the mothers had to teach their children at home as well as attend to all the household tasks, without any of the modern appliances we take for granted today.
Submitted by St Joseph's School, Stratford, New Zealand

Questions from Argentina
The following message for the students at St. Joseph's School came across the KIDPROJ mailing list. Please reply to Ines and her students on that list. You can subscribe to that list here - subscribe to Kidproj Once subscribed, send your reply to: kidproj@listserv.nodak.edu
From: "Ines N. Valente"
To: KIDPROJ@LISTSERV.NODAK.EDU
Hello, students at St Joseph's School , New Zealand,
Your description of your place is TERRIFIC!!! :-))) Can we ask you some questions? Thanks a lot! We would like to know about the name of your lovely Mt Taranaki. Is this last name in some aboriginal dialect?
Here , In Argentina we also had Indians, and they spoke in their different dialects that was changing with the conquer of our lands by Christopher Columbus in 1492.
*** Why are your ancestors mostly of British origin? In Argentina, we also had a lot of immigrants from Italy ( it is the biggest colony in our country) Spain, Yugoslavia, Poland,
***Women had also to overwork because usually they came here almost with no money but people say that Italians immigrants from example , came here for fear to WW II ( WORLD WAR II ) , some others went to New York City and usually worked as masons.
*** The immigrants in our city, Mar del Plata, worked as fishermen because they came from coastal Italian areas. Some of their descendants are rich at present but some others are not.
*** There were schools in Argentina on those days so children went to school. But both, women and men worked very hard to have a promising future. We, my students and I would be very pleased to get some answer from you.
*** Have you seen our Story on the Web?
Students and Ines.

St Joseph's replies:
Reply to Argentina
Our native people are called Maori and their tradition says that they sailed to New Zealand (their name for it is Aotearoa) by canoe from further north in the Pacific Ocean from about 950 AD. Abel Tasman (A Dutchman) is thought to be the first European to sail around New Zealand in 1642 (the sea between New Zealand and Australia is the Tasman Sea, named after him).
In 1769, James Cook, from England made the first of 3 visits. In the early 1800's, whalers came to New Zealand and slowly European settlement started. New Zealand became a country in 1840. Most of our early settlers came from British Isles because of James Cook.
From
Room 3
St Joseph's School
Stratford
Taranaki
New Zealand
c.spragg@xtra.co.nz

To see more of these exchanges look in the KIDPROJ message archives. Begin your browsing at the third week in July, 2000.

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From: Grandmother and Me - a Kidlink book in many languages
Project moderators: Carolynn Bruton, Rubem Paulo and Patti Weeg
Webpage maintained by Patti Weeg
May 2000